Review: Black Sun by Goodrich-Clarke

This is the first time two people associated with Fox Hill are writing a review of the same book, and, of course, its got to be a book about esoteric Hitler cults. We really aren’t this weird people – honest.

Charm laid out the nature of this book well in his review. It is an overview of Nazi inspired right wing lunatics of the post World War II era, covering the heavy hitters and some lesser known individuals. It is a very well researched account of world for which it is difficult to get information, but it is also dry, and skims too lightly over the biographies of these people for my taste. While I think it is important to seriously engage with lunatic ideas about Nazis in Antarctica, I don’t necessarily want to read fifty pages about it. I’d recommend it for the person deeply interested in the lunatic fringe of the right, but perhaps not for the average reader.

A thought on the substance of the book: Much of post WWIII Nazism is enraptured with a mystical religious understanding of Hitler and Nazism. There is much talk in this book about Hitler as a Hindu avatar, Hitler as an alien intelligence, Hitler as a blah blah blah.. What all of this does it put distance between the reality of Hitler as the mastermind of one of the greatest genocides in history and the “theoretical” Hitler of Julius Evola’s books. Goodrick-Clarke hints at this, but is too much of an even keel academic to say what needs to be said – by placing a mystical veneer on the man’s action, you can attempt to cloud the history and make the man more than a murder. This mysticalization of Hitler and Nazism is a dangerous trend in modern ultra right politics, and one that needs to be combated with the cold hard truth that Hitler was just a sociopath, nothing more.

2 responses to “Review: Black Sun by Goodrich-Clarke”

To some extent, groups like Moaist International Movement are doing the same thing, but with a far less mystical bent. There has always been something illogical about fascism, and these people just take this to the extreme…

That’s a good question. It reminds me of George Orwell’s observation that the fascist newspapers in prewar France always had ads for fortune tellers and psychics. There’s some kind of submerged link between fascism and mysticism that doesn’t seem to exist for Hitler peers like Stalin and Mao. As wacky as the Revolutionary Communist Party is about “Marxism-Leninsim-Mao Zedong Thought,” they don’t argue that Mao was the avatar of a race of 1,000-year-old psychic masters living in the Himalayas or something like that.